Recording and reproduction media include flexible disks, magnetic drums, hard disks, and magnetic tapes. Magnetic tapes are playing an important role in data backup among other usages because they have large storage capacities and are inexpensive. Today, tape drives are also expected to be a green storage because of their efficiency and low energy consumption.
However, data read and write performance of tape drives is significantly lower than that of hard disk drives. Although tape drives have transfer rates comparable to hard disk drives, tape drives, which support sequential access, require more time for alignment of the head with the desired data location on the magnetic tape. Hard disk drives support random access and are not limited to sequential access.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus, method, and program that control writing of data by a tape recording apparatus and are capable of solving the problem described above. That is, an object of the present invention is to improve data read and write performance by reducing the time required for alignment during reading and writing data.